Every sentence is gorgeously shaped and polished.Myth and fantasy, fairy tale and reality, combine to create a deeply moving story about death and life, love and longing, and making choices that change everything—even who and what you are. A dark, gleaming gem of a story. – Maria Haskins, Barnes and Noble.

This is one of those stories which it is just a pleasure to savor the words. Beautiful. Sam Tomaino, SFRevu

The standout in the December Lightspeed is “You Will Never Know What Opens” by Mari Ness, a portal fantasy about a house with many doors to many worlds. – Rich Horton, Locus.

…it’s a fun piece with a sort of yearning pull to it, a want to find something that will be perfect, and yet also being okay if that never happens, because the looking is its own reward. A fantastic way to close out the issue! – Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews

…a delightful, thoughtful portal story about all the doors that lead elsewhere. And it has cookies! I love this. – A. Merc Rustad.

You won’t find all that many dark stories on my list of favorites. The ones I do like tend to be etched in beautiful language or have some element of revenge to them (I love a good revenge story). This is not revenge story. – K. Tempest Bradford, io9.com

Short but engrossing. Ness relates the history of a familiar fairy tale artifact in an original way. But first she builds a real-feeling world around the artifact — so well realized that it’s not clear that this is a fairy tale take-off until well into the story. – Matthew Bennardo

The tension is almost entirely in the imagination of the reader. The text has told us nothing about what makes this world so dangerous, and yet we are absolutely certain that it must be because we can feel it lurking just beyond what has been said. The world building is in what has not been, or cannot be, explained. Ness has done a masterful job of manipulating the reader into doing the work. We can imagine far worse than what could ever be said. – Charlotte Ashley, Apex Magazine.

“Godmother,” “Marmalette,” and “Palatina,” in Missing Links and Secret Histories (Aquaduct Press, July 2013) Retold fairy tales; other works in this anthology are science fiction, fantasy and alternate history.